How much do you like Marilyn Monroe? Enough to watch some of her films more than once? Enough to dress like her?

No? You like Marilyn Monroe more than that? Enough to spend the rest of time slowly decomposing inches away from her manky old corpse? No? You like Marilyn Monroe enough to pay $4.6 million so that you can decompose next to her?

Then you, sir, are a creepy old nutjob. And, since the winner of an eBay auction for that exact thing has just backed out, it could still be yours! What a result! What a creepy, creepy result.

These days, any number of things can happen to your body after you die. You can be buried, burnt, shot into space, compressed into a diamond or chopped into pieces on live television by that weird and frankly untrustworthy Polish doctor off the telly. Or, if you happen to be wildly rich, alarmingly obsessed with dead icons and so overwhelmingly creepy that you often find people steadfastly refusing to make eye contact with you at parties because they’re worried that you’ll take it as a sign to engage them in conversation, there’s another way.

And that way involves blowing $4.6 million on a plot in a crypt directly above Marilyn Monroe’s dead body. How the crypt came to be put up for sale is a long and complex story involving Joe DiMaggio, an old lady called Elsie Poncher, divorce, dead husbands, mortgage payments, cremation and gravedigging. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is this – urrrrrrrgh, someone loves Marilyn Monroe so much that they want to get as close as they can to her 47-year-old remains. And it probably stinks. Urrrrrgh!

Or at least that was the plan. The eBay auction for the crypt spot ended yesterday, and the winner looked set to be a Japanese man. We say ’set to be’ because he then decided that there are probably billions of things that he’d rather spend his money on, like a private jet or a giant robot version of himself or a pony made out of dildos or whatever, and he pulled out. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Several hours after being sent an invoice, he e-mailed Poncher’s representative, “I am awfully sorry but I need to cancel this because of the paying problem.” Steve Miller, a mortgage broker and banker who is representing Poncher, said he had e-mailed the 11 other bidders who offered at least $4.5 million, giving them 24 hours to make an offer.

See? So if you’ve been reading this story through envious eyes, wishing there was some way that your dead carcass could be put in a box quite near a person who used to be quite pretty but now probably looks more like Victoria Beckham first thing in the morning because she’s been dead for 47 years, then all is not lost. You can still get in touch with Elsie Poncher and make her an offer.

It’s your lucky day. Now stop reading this. You’re weirding us out.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter